The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

because they’re afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is something everybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. If people thought it was breaking up, they’d be desperate, too. They’d do the same insane things these people here on this planet are doing. General Shanlee was right. Don’t destroy the hope that keeps them sane.”

“We don’t need to do that,” Kurt Fawzi argued. “We can use Merlin to solve our own problems; we don’t need to tell the whole Federation what’s going to happen in two hundred years.”

“It would get out; it couldn’t help getting out,” Ledue said.

“Let’s not try to decide it ourselves,” Conn said. “Let’s get Merlin into operation, and run a computation on it.”

“You mean, ask Merlin to tell us whether it ought to be destroyed or not?” Ledue asked incredulously. “Let Merlin put itself on trial, and sentence itself to destruction?”

“Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers are machines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought to be destroyed, Merlin will tell us so.”

“You willing to leave it up to Merlin, Kurt?” Tom Brangwyn asked.

Fawzi gulped. “Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we’ll have to do it.”

Toward noon, a telecast went out from Koshchei, on a dozen different wavelengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief’s office, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor from Storisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony, appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked by Macquarte’s words:

“This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. We do not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against the world of our birth. But whether we do or not rests solely with you.

“We came here with a dream of a better world, a world of happiness and plenty for all. We have been working, on Koshchei, to build such a world on Poictesme. Now you are smashing that dream. When it is gone, we will have nothing to live for⁠—except revenge. And we will take that revenge, make no mistake.

“We have the weapons with which to take it. Remember, this was a Federation naval base and naval arsenal during the War. Here the Federation Navy built their super-missiles, the missiles which devastated Ashmodai, and Belphegor, and Baphomet, and hundreds of these weapons are here. We have them, ready for launching. Once they are launched, with the robo-pilots set for targets on Poictesme, you will have a hundred and sixty hours, at the most, to live.

“We will launch them immediately if there is another attack made upon Force Command Duplicate H.Q., or upon Interplanetary Building in Storisende, or if Rodney Maxwell is killed, no matter by whom or under what circumstances.

“We beg you, earnestly and prayerfully, not to force us to do this dreadful thing. We speak to each one of you, for each one of you holds the fate of the planet in his own hands.”

The image faded from the screen. As it did, Conn was looking from one to another of the people in the room with him. All were dumbfounded, most of them frightened.

“They wouldn’t do it, would they?” Lorenzo Menardes was asking. “Conn, you know those people. They wouldn’t really?”

“Don’t depend on it, Lorenzo,” Klem Zareff said. “It’s hard for a lot of people to shoot somebody ten feet away with a pistol. But just sending off a missile; that’s nothing but setting a lot of dials and then pushing a button.”

“I’m not worrying about whether they’d do it or not,” Conn said. “What I’m worrying about is how many people will believe they will.”

Apparently a good many people did. Zareff’s combat vehicles began reporting a cessation of fighting. The newscasts, repeating the ultimatum from Koshchei, told of fewer and fewer disorders in the city or elsewhere; by midafternoon, the rioting had stopped.

By that time, too, Rodney Maxwell was on-screen. He was, Conn noticed, wearing his pistols again.

“What happened?” he asked. “They let you out on bail?”

Maxwell shook his head. “Charges dismissed; they didn’t have anything to charge me with in the first place. But they haven’t let me out yet.”

“You’re wearing your guns.”

“Yes, but they still have me penned up here at the Executive Palace; they’re practically keeping me in the safe. I wish our people on Koshchei hadn’t mentioned me in their ultimatum; Jake Vyckhoven’s afraid to let me run around loose for fear some lunatic shoots me and starts the planetbusters coming in. Jake did one good thing, though. He ordered the Stock Exchange closed, and declared a five-day bank holiday. By that time, you ought to have Merlin opened and working, and then the market’ll be safe.”

Conn simply replied, “I hope so.” There was no telling what kind of taps there might be on the screen his father was using; he couldn’t risk telling him about Shanlee, or about the last computation which Merlin had made. “If we send the Lester Dawes in, do you think you might talk them into letting you come out here?”

“I can try.”

Flora arrived at Force Command that afternoon.

“I would have come sooner,” she said, “but Mother’s had a complete collapse. It happened last evening; she’s in the hospital. I was with her until just an hour and a half ago. She’s still unconscious.”

“You mean she’s in danger?”

“I don’t know. They think she’s all right, except for the shock. It was the Travis statement that did it.”

“Think I ought to go to her?”

Flora shook her head. “Just keep on with what you’re doing here. There isn’t anything you can do for her now.”

“The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren’t lying about Merlin,” Sylvie told him.

The Lester Dawes didn’t make it from Force Command to Storisende and back until after dark, and the green and white and red and orange lights were rising in folds and waves. Rodney Maxwell had heard about his wife’s condition;